


Mens Rea

by consulting_scribe



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Friends to Lovers, Hostage Situations, Kidnapped, M/M, Mentions of Suicide, Stockholm Syndrome
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-25
Updated: 2014-04-25
Packaged: 2018-01-20 18:56:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1521923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/consulting_scribe/pseuds/consulting_scribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>mens rea: of guilty mind </p>
<p> </p>
<p>~ John Watson is kidnapped by Sherlock Holmes, a psychopath hell-bent on avenging his sister's murder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mens Rea

December 1st 2013 

There are two reasons John Watson hates his therapy sessions. The first is that he is completely sane. There are several diagnoses on his file – depression, anxiety, eating disorder. Depersonalisation disorder, PTSD, psychotic episodes. Stockholm syndrome. He has been prescribed so many different medications he would be a walking, talking chemical cocktail if he actually took them. 

John is _not _crazy. He is probably one of the sanest people he knows. His twin had walked in on their father cheating on their mother once when they were fourteen. She’d disappeared into a bottle and was still skulking around in there somewhere over two decades later. John had served as the glue that held the fractured remains of their broken family together, bourn the heavy burden of always being the Good Child, spent endless years studying medicine, gone to war, felt the life blood drain from bodies beneath his hands, been shot in the shoulder and abandoned by the one thing in his life he had ever truly considered home. He had spent the last year and a half caught between two psychopaths, scrambling for a hold in the craters of devastation they left in the wake of their destructive games. His house was under surveillance by the police and the most dangerous and powerful man in Britain.__

So, yeah, all things considering, John thinks he is doing pretty well. He doesn’t need therapy. He is fine. It’s all fine. 

The second reason John hates his sessions is because he is almost entirely certain his therapist, Anna, a middle-aged woman with warm eyes and dimples, is plotting to kill him.  
He can’t say where exactly this knowledge comes from, except that it is the same dark place inside of himself that informed him in a rolling, aristocratic drawl that his taxi driver on the way over here likes to wear nappies and pay women to breast feed him, or that the young woman out on reception is currently engaged in an illicit affair with a man twice her age who owns two ( _three John, pay attention _) ginger cats.__

____Anna ( _messy divorce, her choice, weight loss due to stress, staying with a close male relative who enjoys huffing glue in his spare time _) tilts her head to one side, the way she does when she realises John is no longer paying attention to what she is saying. (She hasn’t yet realised that John is never paying attention to what she is saying).______

It takes him a moment (or a minute, hour, day, year) to emerge from the depths of his mind and break the surface of the present. He blinks three times, licks his lips. Flexes his fingers to feel that they are still attached to his hands, which are sitting where they ought to be at the ends of his wrist, extending from his shoulders. His body. 

“Where did you go?” Anna asks. 

John strains his left leg, just to feel the phantom echo of pain. The limp had apparently been a product entirely of his warped mind ( _I know your therapist thinks your limp's psychosomatic, quite correctly, I'm afraid _) but sudden movements after sitting still for long periods of time could still call up an odd twinge and the pain was somewhat useful when he needed to ground himself in his own physicality.__

Anna’s eyes do not follow the movement, do not leave his face at all, but her hand moves subtly across the page. John cannot read what she is writing. She is cleverer than Ella, or perhaps just less inclined to let him read his own goddamn therapy notes. 

“Nowhere,” he says, a beat too late. “Just thinking.” 

Anna hums. “Thinking about what?” 

And he was not thinking about That, about Him, but he knows that she thinks he was thinking about That, or she wants him to think she thought he was thinking about That so that he will think of That. It works. Of course it does. Anyone in Mycroft’s employ must be well-versed in the subtleties of psychological warfare. 

The faint hum of strings fades in through the open window, rides the currents of the wind and sticks in the thin, net curtains that wave gently under the weight of the notes. A moment later, Billie Holiday’s voice rises into the silence of the office, husky and twining with the accompanying orchestra in a way that makes John feel sleepy and sated, like he has eaten a large feast and is punch drunk on a pleasant atmosphere. 

_I’m a fool to want you._

“How have you been sleeping?” she asks when he fails to reply. 

“Yeah, good, fine. Great.” 

He has not slept in twenty-eight hours. He knows it is not actually possible to commit suicide via sleep deprivation but, other than spontaneous combustion or simply dying through sheer force of will power, it is the only method left available to him (once, about three days after he was deposited on the doorstep of a brand new flat with some brief explanation that John didn’t hear except to gather the fact that the flat is in his name and he will not have to worry about money, or anything else for that matter, for the rest of his life, he had tried to overdose on the sparkly new anti-depressants he had been given. No sooner had he swallowed the fourth pill down than a man in a suit burst into the flat, forced him to empty the contents of his stomach into the kitchen sink and then drove him to A &E, just in case. His gun has been confiscated. There are no long, rope-like items left in his flat). 

_I’m a fool to hold you, such a fool to hold you._

The music is so clear, so present, it is like he might go to the window and tip his head out and hear the strains drifting up from one of the lower floors from an old record player. His eyes flicker to the window before he can stop himself. 

“It isn’t real,” Anna tells him calmly. “There’s no music playing right now.” 

“I know,” John snaps. 

_To share a kiss that Devil has known._

_He forces himself to relax. Purposefully unclenches clenched fists._

“Sorry,” he says. 

“That’s okay.” Anna has barely blinked throughout the whole session. Her expression is impenetrable, as constant as her professional composure. He wonders what it would take to push her over that precipice. He wonders what she would do if he shouted and screamed, tore at his hair, her hair, took that fountain pen and gouged his wrists with them. Remember, Watson, you’re sane. Right. ( _A bit Not Good? _). A bit.__

“You seem tense today,” Anna comments. “Why is that?” 

“You know why,” he says. 

“Maybe.” 

“You’ve seen the papers.” 

Anna nods. “Tell me anyway.” 

John considers changing the subject. He will not lie. Anna made it clear early on in their sessions that she will not tolerate lying, but that if he does not wish to answer a question, he can tell her and they will leave it (for now). 

Instead, what he says is, “Greg came to see me last night.” 

“Detective Inspector Greg Lestrade.” 

It is not a question but John nods anyway. 

“He wanted to tell me in person.” He has to stop here. Swallow three times. Breathe too heavily through his nose. He is being too obvious. ( _You’ve quite shown your hand, Doctor Watson _).__

Anna is relentless. “Tell you what, John?” 

_Time and time again, I said I’d leave you._

“To tell me that. Sherlock Holmes. My kidnapper. Is dead.” 


End file.
